(See Cover)
In the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, the intermission had just ended.
It was exactly 9:30 p.m. A woman announcer in a black dress stepped to the platform. Said she: "In the name of the fatherland there will be a salute to the gallant warriors of the First Ukrainian front who have broken the defenses of the Germans — 20 volleys of artillery from 224 guns." The dark days of Stalingrad were over; the Polish offensive of January 1945 had begun.
As she spoke, the first distant volley shook the hall. A lank, bald-headed man in white tie and tails, who bore a slight resemblance to U.S. Senator Robert Taft, mounted the podium and stood with bowed head, facing the Moscow State Philharmonic. He seemed to be counting off the rumbles of artillery. At the 20th, he raised his baton and began the world's premiere of his newest symphony. The bald-headed conductor was Russia's great est living musician, Sergei Prokofiev.
Last week in Boston's Renaissance Symphony Hall, that same music, Prokofiev's Fifth, had its U.S. premiere. It was large in scale, a great, brassy creation with some of the intricate efficiency and dynamic energy of a Soviet power plant and some of the pastoral lyricism of a Chekhov countryside. The man who introduced it to the U.S., the Boston Sym phony's famed Russian-born Sergei Kous-sevitsky, was ecstatic. He called the Fifth "the greatest musical event in many, many years. The greatest since Brahms and Tchaikovsky! It is magnificent! It is yesterday, it is today, it is tomorrow. . . .
Prokofiev is the greatest musician today! Nobody else can write with such technical perfection, with such instrumentation. And all the time there is beautiful melody ! " Peter and the Wolves. Not all Boston's music-goers share Koussevitsky's enthusi asm for his fellow Russians — Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich — but they respect his judgment. Koussevitsky rates 39-year-old Shostakovich as a great-composer-to-be and 54-year-old Prokofiev as a great composer who has already arrived.
It is for the charming little musical fairy tale, Peter and the Wolf, which he wrote to help children identify orchestral instruments, that Prokofiev is mainly known to the U.S. man in the street. He brought the piece to Koussevitsky, tartly recommending it as suitably infantile for Boston and its critics — who had severely panned his Fourth Symphony. Cinemactor Basil Rathbone and Actor-Singer Richard Hale as narrators have made recordings which are now perennial Christmas best sellers. Last season it was played twelve times by U.S. symphony orchestras; it was also dance-timed by Guy Lombardo's Royal Canadians (TIME, Nov. 12). In U.S. phonograph-record sales — principally because of Peter and the Wolf—Prokofiev rates above Mozart, though far below Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.